The Aharoni Lab regularly has openings for postdoctoral researchers, graduate students, and engineers at the interface of neuroscience, engineering, and physics. We look for highly motivated, creative, and independent researchers who want to develop, build, and use new tools to address fundamental limitations in neurobiological research, and who can communicate clearly across disciplines.

Positions are a mix of tool development and neuroscience research, with the balance tailored to each person’s interests. Tool development is directly motivated by open research questions and generally focused on advancing neural and behavioral recording, manipulation, and processing in freely behaving animals: hardware, firmware, software, and analysis. Neuroscience projects use the tools developed in the lab and generally focus on hippocampal and cortical dynamics across space, time, task, and social context. There are also many additional scientific avenues through our collaborations with other neurobiology groups, and opportunities to work on the open-source Miniscope ecosystem itself — documentation, testing infrastructure, training, and community support.

Most of the skills below can be learned in the lab. Previous experience in some of these areas is a plus:

  • Neurobiology: working with mice and/or rats; viral injections and neural implant surgeries; calcium and voltage imaging; electrophysiology; analysis of neural and behavioral data; modeling and machine learning.
  • Engineering: PCB design; CAD/CAM and rapid prototyping; microcontroller and FPGA firmware; embedded Linux; optics design; wireless power and data; programming and UI design.
  • Software and data: Python and scientific computing; real-time and streaming processing; working with very large datasets; open-source development, documentation, and dissemination.
  • Physics: experimental design; strong physical intuition; computation and modeling.

Interested? Email Daniel Aharoni at daharoni@mednet.ucla.edu with a CV and a short note about what you’d like to work on. Prospective graduate students should also apply through a UCLA graduate program (e.g., Neuroscience, Bioengineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering, or Physics) and mention the lab in their application.